


pyrite

by asongtosaygoodbye



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Background Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, M/M, local man yeets emotional support familliar at friend's latent identity crisis, mentions of lucien/nonagon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-18 12:29:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18699637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asongtosaygoodbye/pseuds/asongtosaygoodbye
Summary: One of his long nails worried the curve of a tattoo until it caught on a thin ridge of scar tissue and strummed the line, that vacant, imposter chill rising in his pilfered skin like ice water.Mollymauk tightened his grip until the sharp of his claws dug tiny crescents into the meat of the body he had dug up from the earth and made a home in, this traitor fiction. As if he could alter this corpse enough to cope with the haunting he had made, this unsanctioned ghost. It was so easy to preen and parade and perfume over the deathscent. Line the limbs in jewels and gold and play house—Somewhere there was the sharp, dry click of snap.---In the last hour of the morning watch, Caleb attempts to help ground Mollymauk back into his body.





	pyrite

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! 
> 
> here's my first real forray into critrole fic, brought to you by the vibe of being a mentally ill friend in a cluster of other mentally ill friends all trying to help triage our various coping mechanisms into one another's Bad Times™. it has been such a long time since i've posted anything here, but this show has really come to mean so much to me in the past few months that i've been catching up, and I'm really happy to be getting my fic writing ass back into gear.
> 
> i'm also working on this series of connected drabbles for this hot, grimy urban fantasy/modern-esque AU i've ended up pumping 7,500 words into this week, so hopefully i'll have the first bit of that posted up here in the next week or so. 
> 
> hope you enjoy!

# Pyrite

The dawn was a still, sullen thing.

This swollen, tepid grey that hung low to the trampled, freezing grass, an indelicate smear of green fading into brown with the coming winter—

But he barely felt it. 

Just sat muted on a downed log outside the ring of their campsite, lithe wrists hanging over his knees, staring down into the dirt. 

_“You are...not like yourself, Lucien.”_

_Cree had mourned softly in the low amber glow of the Gentleman’s bar as the night wound down around them, her slitted, topaz eyes bright with drink or something stronger. High on the punchdrunk glimmer of fanaticism, her whiskey breath curled close and conspiratorial in the half light. “You say strange things. Sometimes, I look...I listen and it is like another person has absconded with your skin.” She averted her gaze down into her glass, sorrow treading carefully around her tongue. “I don’t know what has happened to you, since we have parted. These people, they seem...they seem fine, for travelling companions. I just am afraid that they do not...respect you, as they should. That they do not know you, as I do.”_

_“Well, no one ever quite knows a person the same as anyone else.” He had grinned back all cryptic and cavalier over his ale, jewelry glinting a pyrite sheen as he lied through his fucking teeth. Had talked, had charmed. Had chatted his way blind through her questions, all dodged bullets and charlatan skin._

The man she knew was dead.

He knew this.

But sometimes, there were tremors.

The grinding lilt of a dead man’s ghost slithering hot in the bone arena of his skull. Dissonant whispers which always left a vagrant chill in his throat, a full body tremor shuttered in the cord of his spine. 

In the black of his dreams, he held the man she loved down in the water. Ground the heels of his palms into the reflection’s eyes and forced him down thrashing in the dark to stamp out the noise, the cruel residue of another man’s life stuck black beneath his tongue—

The bloodhunter swallowed hard and forced his vision skyward. 

_Lucien._

_Nonagon._

Forced himself to feel the damp chill clinging his shirt to his shoulders. The way it curled plumdark ringlets of his hair round the tips of his ears, tickling the back of his neck.

_How many fucking people had he been?_

“—Mollymauk.”

The name clipped evenly into the stillborn dawn, each syllable softly accented, unfolding like a fact.

 _Caleb, then._

The tiefling dug a garish, ashen hand against his tired eyes, the lavender lids hot and sleepless and sore.  
His fingertips came back with a dull shimmer of gold and he frowned, wiping the ruined pigment off on the edge of his trousers. Yesterday evening's makeup, fixed at the bar.

Smeared all to shit, now. 

_Fuck._

Boots shuffled across dying grass, parched grey and green beginning to freeze in the morning fog, the quiet shallow as a grave.

There was the faint stir of body heat as Molly felt their resident wizard join him on the log a few feet to the left and facing the opposite direction, resuming their watch. 

It had rained in the night.

Molly was dimly aware that their fire had been restarted— there was a dull orange crackling of embers burning low in the circle of makeshift tents and bodies bundled grey against the dirt, the remnants of their soaked and blackened kindling forcibly dried out enough to catch. 

Nott’s meager, makeshift palette had been carefully drug a few yards out from under the cart to a clear space up close to the circle of embers, her sleeping body curled small and close against the cold. 

“It will not last long, but it is something.” Caleb started, his filthy hair hanging in limp strands of auburn around his gaunt, earth-stained face, curling at the edges. The knees of his pants were stained freshly black with mud and he cleared his throat, folding his arms against the chill. "...Have you seen anything?"

The truth was that Molly wasn’t feeling _particularly_ much like company this morning, but that didn’t matter. 

There was this cruel, petty, _childish_ thing sticking lonely and dark in the back of his throat but he swallowed it down. 

That wasn’t what he did, here. This person he was supposed to be was brash and keen and and comforting and quick, so he took a breath and set the muscles of his stolen mouth into a performative smile, forcing himself to speak.

"Oh, you know. Complete and utter fuck-all. _Loads_ of fun.” His voice came out a little hoarse so he brightened it, pitching it back up to something light and easy. “Useless for us to be out here really—I know that _I_ certainly could’ve used the extra few hours of beauty sleep.” He quipped, rolling his shoulder into a lazy, convincing little stretch for good measure.

But the wizard wasn’t watching. 

The sharp line of his jaw just turned away from the motion of the tiefling’s body, lifting his vision back out across the moors. “You know…” There was a slight twinge at the corner of his mouth and he turned back to absently rub at one of his bandaged wrists, thumb pressing into the flat of his palm. “You do not have to do that, right now.”

“I'm doing a lot of things, all of the time.” Molly pointed out with dry bemusement, a sour grin cutting around pointed teeth on the exhale. “You’re going to have to be a _touch_ more specific.”

Caleb rubbed a hand over his mouth, dropped it back down to his knee. “The bullshitting.” He countered quietly, that deadpan tinge of Zemnian curling loose into the silence between them.

A dour, humorless laugh cracked between Molly's lips and he stretched the tension in his jaw skyward, smokey crimson gaze going overcast beneath the cloud cover. “I'm _always_ bullshitting, sweetheart.” 

“Ja.”

It wasn't a confirmation or a denial. 

Wasn't a judgement either.

The conversation folded and Molly tried to breathe through the a blackened tremor in his chest. This shallow, vapid thing.

One of his long nails worried the curve of a tattoo until it caught on a thin ridge of scar tissue and strummed the line, that vacant, imposter chill rising in his pilfered skin like ice water.

He tightened his grip until the sharp of his claws dug tiny crescents into the meat of the body he had dug up from the earth and made a home in, this traitor fiction. As if he could alter this corpse enough to cope with the haunting he had made, this unsanctioned ghost. It was so easy to preen and parade and perfume over the deathscent. Line the limbs in jewels and gold and play house— 

Somewhere there was the sharp, dry click of _snap_. 

It registered through Molly’s brain fog as a gentle weight materialized in the morning chill, bumping up against his shin. It was followed by a soft, insistent purr as the wizard’s familiar curled around the harlequin’s ankles, feline and regal and huffily prodding for attention.

“Oh, you don’t get a _bit_ of love d’you, you grimy little bastard…” The performer murmured towards the little beast, autopilot uncurling his fingers enough to halfheartedly rub the cat's fluffy head, warmth pressing against his palm.

The creature's curious, elongated body pattered and prodded a few more moments before it leapt up into Molly's lap. It proceeded to knead the mismatched fabric of his trousers before settling itself down in a circle, this comfortable, easy weight curled up against his shirt. 

“You know, _Frumpkin_...that is not his real name.”

“Y’don’t say." Molly ground out, pinching the bridge of his nose. “That is...truly astonishing.” Sarcasm snagged dry between his teeth before he could stop it. 

A shadow passed across Caleb’s face and he retreated into the slight tuck of his chin, gaze shifting back down to the dirt.

_Goddammit._

Molly pushed his free hand up through his hair, exhaling out hard into the quiet. “Sorry. I just...wasn’t aware that they came pre-equipped.”

“No.” The human agreed, picking at a loose thread in the cuff of his coat. “Well, I...had a cat, a family cat when I was a boy and that was his name, but—” The thread snapped and he wound it absently between two rough, ink-blackened fingers. “ _This_ one—you know he is not...always the cat.” Caleb reminded him evenly, one of those things that the group at large somehow always managed to forget or not fully understand, no matter how many times he said it. “And you see the Fey, they are very protective of their names. Because you there is...there is _power_ in a name, a true one.” 

A crease darkened in his brow and the man scratched two chapped fingers across his mouth, thumb scraping across his chin. 

“That is true of course for any creature, but the Fey in particular are notoriously careful with it, dealing so often as they do in double-speak and bargains, and it does not… _bode well_ for them so to speak if the person they are trying to string along can invoke their name and bind them to their word, conscript them into their service.” Frumpkin made a move to curl back and check in towards his master and Caleb stopped him with a glance, the unspoken shimmer of a direction prodding him back towards Mollymauk’s lap, the length of thread still spooling through his fingers. “That name is usually the one that a creature is given at their birth, but there are ways to...obscure it or even change it, through arcane means. There are many spells in the world, which can use the power of a name to locate any person, to track them or manipulate them or break through an illusion, but…”

Molly’s brow raised towards the explanation, pupiless eyes skimming up from the cat and his hands to skim across the shadow of his friend’s gaunt face, not quite looking at him, not quite looking at anything but the thread as he systematically delivered the information.

“You know...I am not sure that those things would work so much, if Jester or myself tried to use them with those other things that people call you.” He wiped a hand over his mouth again, clearing his throat. “ _Mollymauk Tealeaf_ is your name. Maybe it is...flashy for my taste but it is...good that it is yours. It would not go well on anyone else.” 

The tightness turned to sandpaper in Molly's throat as a thin, rosy shimmer of validation began to sun itself in the hollow of his chest. 

_Mollymauk Tealeaf._

He seamed his red eyes shut against the sound of the name he had chosen, tried to breathe it down into the bottom of his lungs and keep it there.

When he opened them again, Caleb’s quiet presence was still with him on the log. 

He had said his piece and deflected his attention back to the murky smear of the treeline, shoulder shifted just enough away to give the performer the privacy to take the small offering of information and process it as much or as little as he wanted.

There was still a dull, dizzy pressure behind Mollymauk’s eyes, but gradually he found his shoulders starting to rise and fall again as the evening’s darker questions began to thaw. Each steady breath cleared his head and released some of the impassable tension from his jaw as he lazy strummed lavender fingers through the silky copper softness of Frumpkin’s coat, returning back down into his body. 

“Y’know,” Molly finally spoke, scritching his nails behind the cat’s shoulders. “If I didn’t know better, this all would sound suspiciously close to an attempt to make me feel better—assuming I wasn’t already peachy keen and ready to go.”

“Ja, well. Yasha is not here.” The wizard offered in explanation, rubbing at his elbow. “I know she is usually the one which helps you, when you need it, but she is gone for now, so…”

_This is what you get._

Faint birdsong dabbled beyond the treeline. Quiet calls, small patters of flight and motion.

“Well, I appreciate it.” An earnest bit of smile broke through Molly's mood and he shifted on the log, letting his leg bump loosely against the human's knee. “Somehow against the best efforts of your nature, you've made me feel better. So, A for effort.”

Caleb gave a short nod and diverted his focus back down towards that bit of thread, twining it back and forth between his fingers. “You know, this thing that we are doing here, the lot of us. It works better when we are all fully here, and you have...” He added slowly, weighing the words in his mouth, thinking better of them. “You and I are not always necessarily like the rest.”

He wiped the weight of the statement off on the edge of his pants, chin dropping back towards the dirt. 

There was a slight jingling of metallic chains and charms as Mollymauk cocked his head, brow creasing a fraction. “...How do you mean?”

Far as he saw it, the lot of them were essentially defined by how glaringly un-alike they were. If he were to attempt to sort or group them by type, he might go Empire-born vs elsewhere, ranged or up-close fighters, humans vs tieflings vs greenish folks...perhaps a split down the middle of a roll call on the most to least qualms about robbing a grave to loot a body. 

But even so, if there were any categories which he could neatly fit both himself and the standoffish spellcaster into— _capable of some magic, not particularly strong compared to the ladies, pretty fucking high on that list of folks ready to dig up that body_ —there were almost always at least one or two other members which greyed the designation. 

He watched as Caleb reflexively drew his sharp elbows in against the question to his logic, thin and bitter and invisible. 

“We are...neither of us always so good, up here. In the head.”

The man punctuated the statement with a short, derisive jab towards his own temple. The humorless, loathsome quirk of a smile. 

“Ah. I think that’s fair, overall.” Molly agreed, relaxing his palms further apart from his body on the log. “I mean, the lot of us are certainly a gaggle of maladjusted motherfuckers, and Beau was _definitely_ dropped on her head as a tot, but...” He shifted his gaze up to a ring of distant magpies circling against the stark grey sky like an omen, following their patterns. “Maybe our bullshit has a little bit of extra song n’ dance?”

Words failed and the other man just nodded once. 

“...Maybe.”

A whisper under the breath, repeated towards the dirt.

Understanding settled into the silence between them.

The warm, comfortable weight of the cat nipped at his fingers and he resumed his pats, looking out over the thin dregs of fog swirling in the pass until the faintest shimmer of sunlight began to break over the horizon, sending scattered motes of gold drifting hazily between the trees. 

Behind them the horses stirred, beginning to graze. 

Across the camp he saw Beauregard shift, scrubbing a hand across her face. 

She yawned once and twisted her shoulder before pushing herself up from her bedroll and staggering out towards the edge of the treeline, rubbing the back of her head. 

Soon she would be starting her morning pushups, one-hundred of them pressed into the soggy earth. Molly thought briefly about joining her—not for that first bit, but just after. 

The two of them had been building something of a routine, sitting down together in the grass trading the types of stretches they had learned to keep the body limber in their respective walks of life. Her's from inside the cool walls of a monastery, his from beneath the spangled blue of a circus tent, the chatter and noise of a troupe on the move, spattered with sky. 

Occasionally, they would join their hands or line up the soles of their feet to push through the motions of various partner stretches, talking shit the whole way through. All rolling eyes and scattered petty barbs dug at one another as they carefully supported the other's body into the proper pose, popping tension from the night before, preparing for the mystery of the day before them.

“Well, I’m gonna go dig around for something to eat, make sure our monk doesn’t walk off into a hole.” Mollymauk gingerly lifted the curled up feline off of his lap and stood, twisting some of the ache out of his spine. Breathed in once then out, the chill morning dew thinning against the heat of his skin.

Frumpkin pattered neatly across the top of the log, curling into a circle. 

“And...” Molly stopped himself a moment before leaving, steady on his feet. “...thank you, Caleb.” The tiefling said as he left, hand patting the man's shoulder. “Y’know you're sweet, when you wanna be.” He gave his shoulder a little squeeze and leaned over to drop a casual kiss to the top of his head, voice muffling soft against his hair.

The hunter in him could feel the telltale shift of heat flushing across the back of the human’s neck, infrared in the morning chill. There was tension there too, a shifting of the scapula sharp and stark beneath his shirt. 

“...Good day, Mollymauk.” Caleb responded stiffly, shifting the barest fraction away from the touch. 

Molly didn't push it. 

Just patted his shoulder once more in parting and disengaged towards the strange circle of people he had somehow aligned himself with on this swirling path he had taken in the slow wake after his second birth, a familiar slant of open-ended possibility rising in his lungs like a song.

**Author's Note:**

> i was super nervous about breaking the ice and finally posting this after editing it back and forth and back and forth for a few weeks, so if you dig it, i super appreciate you letting me know <3


End file.
